rican artist Mary Cassatt. The oil-on-canvas painting is currently in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which also holds a preliminary drawing for the work. The painting displays a bourgeois woman in a loge at the opera house looking through her opera glasses, while a man in the background looks at her. The woman's costume and fan make clear her upper class status. Art historians see the painting as commentary on the role of gender, looking, and power in the social spaces of the nineteenth century. Background Personal identity Cassatt's female subjects are often seen as an extension of her personal life. Cassatt had an early passion for painting and convinced her father to allow her to attend art school at a time when it was unusual for women to do so. After her father gave her permission to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she moved to Paris, where she practiced as a painter and exhibited with the Impressionists. The art historian Susan Yeh has argued that Cassatt's female subjects, like Cassatt herself, overcome gender stereotypes and pursue independe